How to Start an Amazon Business

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Angie Chacon learned how to start an Amazon business through the online course, The Amazing Selling Machine. Jason Katzenback (Co-founder of Amazing.com) interviews Angie as she describes her rags-to-riches story of going from a single mother, barely able to support her kids, to the owner of a large, successful business.

In this video, Angie shares her Amazon FBA success story, business mindset, mistakes she made launching her first product (and how she remedied it by restudying the ASM course), thoughts on the Amazing Selling Machine training, how she expanded her Amazon business, the tools she leverages, and how she utilizes Amazon FBA.

Amazon FBA Success Story

A friend recommended the Amazing Selling Machine (ASM), Angie took the course, and in six months she was selling $60,000 a month. By the end of the year, she was up to 100k per month, and then 200k a few months later. After two more years, she was selling 500k per month. She now has one brand and sells 40 different products in seven different countries with Amazon.

Angie started by selecting a product that she thought would work, but also one that was in a category that offered a lot of growth. She found a unique supplier, created her own label and brand name, and then shipped everything to the Amazon fulfillment center. Using the fulfillment centers means that you determine a price, Amazon takes a percentage, and you are paid out every two weeks.

With Amazon’s marketing, she was then able to start selling.

Angie kept the same brand and added more products that complemented her existing products. This resulted in customers buying multiple products, as well as purchasing several items in each order.

Her brand now has 40 products and sells in seven different countries. Rather than trying to get her product into other retailers, she has focused her energy on Amazon because the marketplace is so large. She plans to expand her business on Amazon by 5x, and to build a Shopify store to sell on her own website.

Angie spent the first six months of her business working two jobs—a full-time day job and selling on Amazon whenever she had the time. After some time, she was able to quit her other job and focus entirely on Amazon. A few weeks later, she hired a part-time employee who quickly became full-time. She now has 13 employees. She also owns her own manufacturing company.

Amazing Selling Machine Review

Amazing Selling Machine (ASM) is a seller training course that teaches people how to start their own Amazon business. No prior e-commerce experience is necessary, as the course guides sellers through each step of the process.

Angie attributes her success to following the ASM model, though she admits that she didn’t follow their recommendations a few times, and it got her in trouble. This included selling before she had finished the modules, which resulted in an initial failed product. After taking the time to complete all of the ASM courses, she immediately saw a turnaround.

ASM exposed her to specific tools that manage her inventory, isolate her sales, and look at her profit and expenses. This sort of tool pulls data directly from Amazon.

The ASM course was invaluable to Angie’s success, and she says that it paid for itself within the first couple months of her business. She also recommends SellerCon because of how it changed her business.

How to Choose Products to Sell on Amazon

Angie’s tips on choosing a product to sell are:

Be aware of how your products are selling in order to know if it is the right time to add new product.

Speed is incredibly important—this includes the speed at which you get new products and the speed at which you sell.

Do not take a year to pick a product, but find the right one for you with a specific manufacturer. Once it sells, you can add another product.

Pick a product, get it out there, and get the process moving!

Single Mom Builds Amazon Empire – Video Transcript

Jason K.: Hi everyone, Jason Katzenback here from Amazing Selling Machine and amazing.com, and I have a fantastic guest for you today. Someone who is a really true rags to riches story, someone who, a busy caring single mom who was able to turn her life around from a struggling nine to five worker, who is just trying so hard to make ends meet, take care of all of her children and live a fun lifestyle, and now has been able to turn it around, has this incredible business that she’s built. In fact, she’s built an empire for herself. She’s got employees, she travels the world, she’s helped so many people. You are gonna hear live from her right now everything there is to know about her success story and why this is such a good opportunity right now with Amazon.

Now before I get into that, and before I get right into our caller, I just wanted to remind everyone so that these Facebook lives are brought to you by our free training series at amazingsellingmachine.com. If you go to amazingsellingmachine.com/videoseries, you are gonna learn, you are gonna get access to four free videos that go through step by step the entire process from start to finish of how to leverage Amazon to be able to build your own brand, a brand that you 100% own, and like Angie our special guest use this training to be able to create for yourself a life really that you’ve only dreamt of.

I urge you if at least nothing else just get the free training and be enlightened to what the possibilities are. It’s all proven training, very effective and we are very, very proud of it. With that being said, let’s get right back into the training. As we are sitting here talking with Angie, what I’d love you guys to do as well is please like, share and comment on the post. If you enjoy something it would be great for you to share with others.

Angie’s story is really inspiration, and of course we’d love you to like, but as always please comment on the post. Let us hear what you love, what inspired you, questions that you might have. Hopefully we have time to get some questions as well. With all that said, and I’m seeing some likes and hearts. That’s cool. With all that being said let’s get right into it. Angie, first of all thank you for being here.

Angie: Thank you for having me.

Jason K.: It’s been incredible, the hype that I hear about you, and I heard about you so quickly how you’ve got to meet Angie, you’ve got to meet Angie, and just how first of all everyone falls in love with you when they meet you, but just because of such a great story. Often times people are looking for … They are almost unbelievable stories, but what’s cool about this is is this is a story where it shows you, where you use a system and you just put hard work in, and you follow it, and what’s totally possible from it. Maybe what you can do, I’m gonna stop talking, I’m gonna turn the mic over to you. If you could share with everyone the story of where you came from, how you came across this business model and where it took you from there.

Angie: Yeah. For sure. Basically it was about three and half years ago, and I was definitely looking for an opportunity. I had just gone through a divorce, I had to just leave a previous business that I was doing, and I was kind of starting over from scratch. I was working a nine to five job doing customer service at a lighting manufacturing company. It wasn’t enough, I wasn’t making enough to support my kids or really have any kind of future like I wanted to.

I was pretty desperate to find something and honestly it probably took me two years of looking, and looking into different opportunities. One of my friends had bought the Amazing Selling Machine course, and she was doing it, and she was doing fairly well. To be honest, at first I thought, it’s probably like an MLM or some kind of pyramid scheme. To be honest, that was my first thought, and I was just like, “Nah, I don’t want to look into it.” I actually passed … I could have been ASM3, but I just was too skeptical and I didn’t want to look into it, because it seemed actually a bit too real to be true also.

Then I heard another person that was doing it, and finally I was like, “I need to just check into this and see what it’s all about.” Then I realized it’s really just a course, and it’s not a multilevel thing, and people do this course, which is based on successful actions on how people do really well selling in Amazon, and they are selling products. That’s all they are doing, they are just listing and selling products at Amazon. I didn’t have a lot of eCommerce experience and I actually never had sold or bought anything on Amazon, but I had a bit of marketing. I enjoyed marketing and I had a little bit of experience in that, and I had an idea of a product like that I could probably get into.

Then I went ahead and got the course, and that sort of got me started. I think one of the things that people talk about with me is because I moved really fast. I went from, the first couple of months was a bit of getting used to the course and studying and figuring it all out, because it was all new to me, but then after that couple of months just like I had a product, and it was up on the Amazon, and then I went from zero to doing $60,000 a month in sales in just six months.

By the time that year was over I was doing $100,000 a month in sales. Then four months later I was at 200,000 a month in sales. Then in about two years I was hitting the 500,000 a month in sales mark. There is a lot that contributed to me growing that fast with the business but it was definitely not anything I ever expected, but it was really exciting.

Jason K.: I have to be very honest with everyone, this is a journey for everybody. We have students that don’t implement anything and they don’t achieve success like Angie does. I don’t want anyone on this call to think like this is a guaranteed success. What I do want to share with you is that people that take advantage of this opportunity and really own it, and I think own your success, own what it is that you want to achieve. This is an incredible avenue to be able to follow.

Angie maybe you could share too, because a lot of people seem to get still a little bit confused on the idea of what being a brand seller means, what a private label seller is, and how this isn’t … You are not in partnership selling, you don’t know ask 5%, you don’t know any down line, this is your own brand. Could you expand on that a little bit?

Angie: Yeah. For sure. What I found is the course, first of all the course is very-very easy to understand. Being someone who doesn’t really know anything about eCommerce or Amazon at all, I had a really easy time going through watching the videos and learning how to do everything. I really appreciated that about the course, because I’ve done other courses and nothing was quite as easy, and there was never that support group to go to also when you had questions. I really did appreciate that about the course and it made it a lot easier, but the first thing was like, look on Amazon and see what’s selling and see what people are interested in.

I picked a product that I thought would be good, and there was a whole category that I felt like I could expand into. I rarely just on my own I went out. I found a supplier for those products. I created my own label, had my own label, I created my own brand name, and put my own label and brand on the products, and really just had it shipped to Amazon. I used Amazon fulfillment center, I shipped to the fulfillment center which all the modules taught me how to do that, so it was really easy. Once it was there I created my listing with Amazon and I used some Amazon marketing, and I sold my product.

Amazon pays out every two weeks. I get all the money from the sales of my product, I determine my own price, and Amazon takes whatever their percentage is for selling on their platform and their fulfillment fees, and I’m easy making 20 to 30% profit in my pocket, and it’s all my money and I can determine how much I’m selling my product for. I can really decide how much I want to sell my product, based on how much I want to put in marketing it. It’s my own thing, it’s my own business and-

Jason K.: Very cool. That’s one of the things that I really want to stress is that this is creating something that you build. We just provide, you teach a man how to fish, or as the saying goes you teach a person how to fish rather than fishing for them. That’s what this says, for people that, and not everyone is meant to be an entrepreneur, not everyone is meant to be a business owner. People ask me all the time, this is so great, why don’t all your employees do it? In fact, some of my employees do do it. Some of them have businesses, other ones they just don’t want to, it’s not their cup of team. Some people don’t like running a business.

However, if you are sitting there and you want to run the businesses, if you feel that I know how I was when I was working from nine to five. When I was working those hours lining someone else’s pocket, barely making anything for the input I put in, I knew I wanted something different, I knew I didn’t want to work for somebody else. I knew I wanted to create my own path, and since 2005 I’m very proud I’ve been able to do that. Amazon has helped me tremendously over the last five years, because it is such an incredible model. If you fit that just like Angie did, if you are ready to take control, this is just such a beautiful model.

Again, if you haven’t checked it, make sure to check out the free training series at amazingsellingmachine.com, where it covers everything that Angie is talking about here regarding the Amazing Selling Machine course. Angie, when you got started, what was … I’d love to know the story as you were sitting there, because so many times we have people that they are the first person to join when we open the doors. There is other people that have sat there and waited days and days and kind of just at the last minute did it. Where were you on that path when you signed up?

Angie: I was in the last hour right before the doors were about to close. It’s not because I didn’t want to be the first one, I actually did not have the money. I had no resources, I had no financing, I had no credit card, I had no way … I was so broke, I had no way to come up with the money for the course. It was so important to me to do it, and I knew that it was so valuable to have … It was literally in those last hours and I was … I happened to be at an event and I ran into a friend of a friend who had also heard about the course. We ended up connecting at this event, and she was like, “I have the money to buy this course, but I don’t have the time to do it.” I was like, “I have the time to do it but I don’t have the money.”

Jason K.: This is perfect.

Angie: It was literally like that, in that last hour we bought the course. It was kind of one of those magical moments, which was great but that’s what I did.

Jason K.: Very cool. Then when you joined, one of the things that we always mention to people is just follow the system, because … Anyone that is interested in joining, I just want to make this very clear. There is really two steps to this business model. What we teach with the Amazing Selling Machine is how to get from point A to point Z as effective as possible, and that means getting your first product up and live on Amazon. We also teach you a little bit of scale and growth, but really those lessons are what’s taught once you start selling. Once you get all that experience and everything.

We have other programs, other training that we do help get to the next level. It’s really about just getting your own brand up and selling on Amazon. There is gonna be different criteria after what you are looking for in a product for example as to when you are established. Some people might be on the call right now and saying, “I have this great idea for a product, but I don’t know if it would sell.” We’d follow you through a system so you could identify yes, this product, there are other similar products that look like this on Amazon, so that means it’s a good product to potentially sell.

If there isn’t, then there is a huge risk for you, because you as a brand new seller you have to now guess whether or not this is … Because there is no proof until you start selling. With all that said, I’m curious for you, what was your process when the eight weeks rolled out for you? When you joined, did you take action right away? Were you one of the ones that you sat there too long, what did you do, and if you could have changed anything, what would it be?

Angie: First I’ll admit that I’m guilty of actually not following the course a couple of times and it actually got me into trouble both times.

Jason K.: Learned similar lessons, that’s good.

Angie: Yes. At the very beginning I was sort of reading through doing the modules and watching the videos, and I kind of maybe jumped the gun, and I was like, I have this product and I know it’s gonna be great, because I love this. Of course, I can sell it, and I really got it, and I sent it to Amazon and it sucked. It did not do well at all. That was my first product, and I did that within, it was before the eight weeks was over, probably I was four weeks into it. And now I was like, I know what I’m doing. I put this product … It was just trickling. It was making some sales but it was nothing like what I wanted, or what I thought was gonna be viable.

I actually went to one of my friends and I was like, “What am I doing wrong?” They used to mention to me, do you know that you picked the right product? I’m like, “I don’t know actually.” Then I went and I really studied the modules and it was very, very night and day clear that I had picked the wrong product. There was no doubt about it. When I actually sat down, really watched the training on how to pick, all of a sudden it was like, duuh. Why didn’t I figure this out? I didn’t even read the, I must not have watched those videos.

Jason K.: It’s funny how something, I fall into that myself sometimes too because I’m impatient, you think I can skim this, this looks like a great product but yes, follow the system, because you hear proof right there that she tried paving her own way, and it hurt her. Instead, she had to kind of restart and follow the system from that point on. When you did finally kick in and you were like, okay I got this now. When did you really see that, oh my goodness, this is gonna work?

Angie: That was probably, I was probably two months into I bought the course. It was two months later and I was struggling with that one product, I went back, I watched the videos and then I was like, okay. I went out there. I immediately found I think three products that I could immediately get from my supplier that I could turn around first. I got one of those up within weeks and it started really well. I got the next one up a month later, the next one up a month later. Then it went from doing pretty much nothing to seven or 10,000 a month just in this couple of months of launching those first products. That’s when I shot up, in that six months period I was doing 60,000 a month. They ramped up pretty quickly after that.

Jason K.: Did you, there are so many strategies or some people that they’ll just stick with the same product and flash it out a long time, they’ll then expand on that product line, some people will just duplicate their product. What path did you follow?

Angie: I kept the same brand and I just kept adding more and products that I thought kind of complimented my existing products. I actually really liked that because I started finding a lot of people went out buying multiples of my product. They wouldn’t just buy one thing, they’d come in and buy several items, and that’s been really good.

Jason K.: How many products do you have now, and how many brands do you have?

Angie: I have one brand, and I have 40 products, but I’m in the US, and I’m in Canada, and I’m in five countries in Europe, that is 40 products multiplied by different countries.

Jason K.: One of the things a lot of people will argue about, obviously you’d never experience something it’s hard to understand, but a lot of people think don’t you need to start your own website, what about going onto Amazon, eBay, all these other things. Time and time again when I ask any of my successful students, it’s really 90% of everything I do comes from Amazon even though on I’m on those other areas. Is that true for you as well?

Angie: Yeah. I’ve looked at going on Walmart and other places but the amount of effort you have to put into the amount of what you get back is so small that it doesn’t make sense. I do want to build off Amazon, and I started doing that, but I didn’t even have my own website for the whole first year or so I was in business. To me I was just maximizing my efforts on Amazon. Amazon.com because it is the larger of marketplaces. I focused on that, and that’s where I get the most amount of money and make the most of my profits.

Jason K.: That’s so wise. It’s been great that I’ve been able to help so many students over so many years now, because you can hear these stories over and over again, and then you start, you can really focus in on this is the real path to success. What we are finding is that somebody that really sticks to it and flashes out to Amazon directly seems to have the most benefit, by focusing on trying to do everything else, in fact, as you just said I’m selling on Amazon USA at Amazon.com, Amazon Canada, in Europe, like you are expanding all over the place without having to really do anything different.

Yeah you have to now all of a sudden open up your Amazon sellers, your PN accounts, but you’ve already got your products on Amazon, so it’s very easy to kind of get transition. What’s next for you? It sounds like you are dominating Amazon.com, you are starting to take over my country in Canada, you’ve gotten in Europe. What’s your next move for scaling this empire you are building?

Angie: I want to basically 5X what I’m doing this year in Amazon. I want to build heavily my Shopify store. I do have my own website and I do want to start, I’ve been building that, but I have a lot more efforts going into it this year, and I want to have that be doing at least 25% of what my Amazon sales are doing.

Jason K.: Very nice. That’s such a beautiful strategy because it’s really about getting established in certain areas, really owning it, making sure you are comfortable. Then now switching and really expanding Shopify, because there is no doubt about it, once you’ve got your business rocking and rolling, Shopify is … Building any third party store is really a must do. Five times this year, that’s impressive. Something I haven’t done yet, and I’m really sorry, and I realize we are already over 20 minutes into this. I haven’t actually done any interaction with our audience. We’ve got a bunch of people. You’ll be surprised to know that Athena is on this call. I didn’t know, is that’s shocking? Good to see you Athena.

Angie: Hi.

Jason K.: Anybody that is listening right now, if you have any questions at all for Angie, please post them in there, we’ll do our best to be able to answer them. I see one for right Tony E, he says, “How do I get started and how much does it cost?” I’ll answer this in two ways, first of all, I’m gonna answer how you get started, and I would head over to amazingsellingmachine.com. I’ll put a link in the comment link and we’ve got a free training series that will walk you right through the process. Maybe Angie you can share, how much does it cost to get going with this business.

Angie: I paid for the course, it was what? $4,000. What I liked about that is it’s not just the course. That’s when people ask me it’s something that I think is really important because to me the course was a good part of the value but I would say like 70% of the value is the community, is the help, the mentorship, the ongoing mentors that help you, the private community that are you are part of, you can ask questions and interact with everybody else, and people share their successes and things that they did that worked or referrals for shipping companies whatever, just the resources and the help to me is probably 70% of the value, and the fact that it’s ongoing, and then the updates, you are always getting updates when Amazon makes changes, because they make changes. That’s all vital, and to me that is worth every penny.

I made that back in my first couple of months selling on Amazon. It paid back for itself. The investment, it seems like a lot of money, or it seemed like a lot of money for me when I was broke and I had nothing, but looking at it as far as a business investment it is actually really-really inexpensive.

Jason K.: It’s such a good point. At the end of the day I get it. For some people $4,000 is just not realistic. That’s why we provide the free training. Once you join the Amazing Selling Machine you see everything that we put into it, you see the mentors we have constantly in there. You see our training is constantly updated. It’s not like it’s updated once ever couple of years. Every six months it’s completely updated. We are very proud of all this, but we are most proud of our students and our network, and as Angie said, the community … We are gonna be hosting a live event in Orlando called SellerCon in a couple of months.

It’s just, maybe you can share a little bit of that, because just the community that it creates and the experience that you have.

Angie: I’m very excited to go to SellerCon. I’ve been attending your live events ever since I signed up three and a half years ago. It was a huge change in my business because I had started selling in September, and it was February when the first event happened. It was a good timing for me, for my business. It was a couple of months, or a few months, and I had gotten started, and I got a product out, and then I went to my first live event, even though there was a lot … There was a lot of information, a lot of speakers, a lot of great data, and to be honest a lot of it was over my head being a new seller.

Just a few key things that I got from that event and I implemented in my business, and my business over the next few weeks doubled, and then tripled a couple of weeks later. It was huge. The amount of expansion I did after that event was huge.

Jason K.: I need to really emphasize something here. She’s not being paid to be on here, we didn’t tell her what to say. These are her results. Again, this is because she’s taken action. She went to the live event, she networked, she found people, she has a huge network now. It’s implementing what you learn from there, and taking action, and that’s the same thing with the training, won’t you agree? It’s about just taking action and really jumping in and owning it. People pay this money, it’s amazing actually, it shocks me at times that people will pay this money and then they’ll do things, and I’ll ask them, and they obviously did not go through the training. It’s like, why are you robbing yourself?

The whole idea is like you’ve got the privilege for this education, for learning off of thousands of sellers now. This community all interacts together. There is no way anybody just standing on their own could be more successful out of the gate than following this course, I just can’t see how it would be possible. Do yourself a favor if you are serious about this. Join, but make sure you follow the system.

I’ve got some questions now that are gonna be directed at you. I’m gonna put a little bit of pressure on you from our audience. Not really anything serious, but Hamida asked, how do you manage all the products, and following with this process overall? I’m amazed that you have 40 products distributed all over the world? More or less like how are you able to manage your business with 40 products?

Angie: I’ll admit that I’m not super sophisticated. I don’t use any program that manages … I actually have a couple of tools I might use to manage my stuff, which is a tool we promoted.

Jason K.: Awesome tool. Yes.

Angie: That helps me a lot to isolate how much my sales are, and what my profit and expenses are. That is a big part, and that just automatically pulls the data from Amazon and shows me what I need to know. A lot of what I need is that, and otherwise I use excel spreadsheets. I download information, I figure out how much I’m selling.

Jason K.: I think maybe something that you could clarify for them because this is actually one of the benefits to using Seller Central on FBA and everything, is that you actually don’t have to manage things daily … That’s not true. We all know that’s not true. You have to be managing certain things daily but because of what Amazon does, you actually don’t have to be in the details like that. Maybe explain what your day is like managing this business.

Angie: It’s pretty easy. I have staff now obviously that do a lot of it for me. To be honest at this point I probably maybe spend a day or two, a week in my office, or a couple of hours a day. I just got back from being gone for nine days in Hawaii. I do have the luxury of being able to do that at this point. I have about 13 staff in my office. Some are dedicated specific to Amazon, some are specific to other things but the typical day is I come in, we handle customer service, any emails, anything that we can do to keep our customers happy, get reviews, things like that, any kind of promotions that we are doing on our products, any Facebook advertising or anything that we want to do to help drive traffic and boost our sales.

Otherwise, just looking over the account, looking over the account, looking over everything making sure things are converting, maybe once week we manage our Amazon advertising, go in there, tweak some stuff here and there, and then I’d say the most of the rest of our time is spent on looking for new products.

Jason K.: Very cool. Everybody has got to run their business differently. I know people that are doing phenomenal that still have only one employee now. They’d like to do as much as possible. Not what I recommend, I like following Angie’s path where your time should be always spent on being able to grow your business and be on those higher levels.

The big thing too, I guess with that question, it wasn’t like you hired people right away. How long did you wait, at what point in your business that you started hiring people?

Angie: I’d say for six months. The first six months of my business, I actually had two jobs. I worked my other job still full-time, and I worked Amazon when I could, evenings, weekends, whenever. I was working a lot. I was taking everything that I was making from Amazon and putting it back in, because you can have one product, and then that would be increasing, so you need more inventory, and then I wanted another product. Now I needed money for inventory for a new product.

I just kept doing that until I was building my products. I had several products, and I was able to keep up with the growth of the sales. I did that for about six months. Then after six months was when I found I could kind of extract myself, I quit my other job and focused full-time on Amazon. Within a couple of months after that I hired my first employee. First it was part-time for a few weeks, and I rapidly needed her to start going full-time after that.

Jason K.: Awesome.

Angie: Then I had one other employee actually probably for a good year before I even hired another one, but then I started my own manufacturing company. That’s kind of a whole another thing but I decided to do my own manufacturing, so then I hired staff to do that.

Jason K.: What I love about your story is, like I said there are some people that simply they don’t have an office, they work in their living room, they have a couple of outsourced employees, and they just do this for a lifestyle, where they know they just have to work a few hours every day on the business. They can work on growing it. They can take it that way. There is other people that they hire all their family. They create a big family corporation, more or less out of this.

Then there is other people like you that are like, “I want to do everything.” You go from not only selling to making the product and growing, but it had to start with just one thing. You started selling on Amazon, finding a passion for doing something you really loved, and then becoming your own manufacturer?

Angie: Yes.

Jason K.: That’s pretty awesome. How many years did it take for that transition?

Angie: I would say, it was probably a year and a half after I got started where I started really doing my own manufacturing. Then about a year ago I started manufacturing for others. Now that’s just growing and growing. It’s-

Angie: I love it. It’s fun. I’ve been able to do so much since I started this course and since I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing. My life is never like it’s ever been before.

Jason K.: That’s a good thing?

Angie: Yeah.

Jason K.: I just wanted to make sure we were gonna add that part. I want to ask you this question from Sarah K, and she says, “Hi Angie. I’m a disabled single mom. Can I do this from home without having to leave the house much?”

Angie: Yeah. For sure.

Jason K.: Sarah, that is one of the good things I’m trying to get across actually with what I was talking about with the path that Angie took compared to others. This really is a virtual thing now, the big difference is, what country you live to where you sell. The only thing I say that for is because when you are originally getting your products you always want to look at your inventory initially, you can use straight-forwarders but for example if you are living in even Canada and you are gonna sell in the US, you would want to be able to get samples.

If you are living in the US and selling in the US, it is so easy, because you can get products sent right to your house. You can send them to Amazon. If you live in a country like Canada, there are some things that it makes it a little bit trickier to be able to manage. We cover everything. In fact, since I said there is still no reason to leave your house. There really isn’t. Everything can be set up online, as long as you can get things mailed to where you are, there is … That’s it. You have to be on the phone a couple of times I guess to answer some questions to Amazon maybe when customer support stuff happens, but that would be about it.

Angie: That’s why I started this business because I wanted to be mobile. I wasn’t actually planning to have an office and all that but at the beginning I needed to be mobile, I needed to have my laptop, and be able to do something whenever and wherever I was. That is actually why I started this business, and that’s I love about it.

Jason K.: It’s true. You have to be careful sometimes. Sometimes you think you are part of that process. Now I guess this is logically what you do, but I found, and I’ve been through this. I quit my job 13 years ago, and then I found a few years later like, wait a sec, now I’m back in office. This is why I quit my job. You’ve got to, the freedom of having this is just incredible, very, very cool. Did you start with an American supplier or did you use Alibaba?

Angie: I’ll just say that I’m in the beauty category. Beauty products you don’t want to buy from China. I do everything in the USA.

Jason K.: Very cool.

Angie: I have bought things from overseas and I have imported and stuff, but it’s not the majority of my business.

Jason K.: I want to read this Wictoria, with a W, that’s a very pretty name. Can wait to see you at SellerCon, you are such an inspiration, I want to share this with my mom once I am also successful with Amazon. I’ve sent her your story, she’s so inspired by you, thank you for sharing your value and inspiring other moms that have a hard time out there. I appreciate it.

Angie: That was awesome. Thank you.

Jason K.: Yeah, it is. Do you work alone, or have help? We know you have employees now, but you started in a business partnership, correct?

Angie: Yeah. That was very short-lived. That was for the first month or two and then I ended up going my own way. I’ve been pretty much doing this and building this on my own.

Jason K.: That’s been how long now, three years?

Angie: Three and a half years about.

Jason K.: I’m trying to think if I have any other questions that I want to ask you. Let me see here if there is any other question. I love seeing this, the course is worth every penny. How did you design your brand, what was the process you used?

Angie: Design my brand? I just kind of looked at what the best sellers were out there already, like who is the top sellers on Amazon, what are the top selling brands of my type of product in the stores? Just kind of research and I surveyed, I did some different designs and surveyed some different things with friends and friends of friends to see, would you buy this, and do you like this design? Do you like this brand name, just surveys, asked different people and narrowed it down to look, and products and pricing and all that.

Jason K.: Very cool. Again, I just want to remind you if you go to amazingsellingmachine.com, we’ve got lots of training for you, if you want to know about how to find products, the ideas behind brands and all those kind of things, go check it out at the amazingsellingmachine.com. Please, please, please, please, like and share this post. It really helps us. We are loving the reactions that we are getting on Facebook lives. That’s why we are doing this. I’ve got more, another awesome Facebook live happening tomorrow where we are gonna be teaching about cash flow in this business.

Today we wanted to share with you a success story. If you have any questions for Angie at all, let us know. If you want to know her story, anything, or if you want to ask some questions about Amazon. We are gonna be on for about 15 more minutes and then we’ll from there. Another question here, how quickly did you add your additional products?

Angie: I had one product for a couple of months, and then I would say within that next month I had another new one, the next month a new one, the next month a new one. That was sort of my first six months build up. Then I realized how important it was to actually have that as part of my machine. I would watch the guys that were doing millions a month on Amazon, and they had people that that’s all they did for them. They sourced and launched products. And they actually had a regular thing. There were so many happening every day or every week, or whatever every month.

I started putting more tension on every quarter I’m gonna have whatever for new products or something like that. Every time I would look and source I would look for the next five or 10 products I wanted to do so that I could be moving on all of them, and getting samples, whatever I needed to do. I had a regular system going on of being able to launch new products. That’s been really important for my growth. I’ve seen it in friends that are doing two million a month and things like that. That’s something that’s really important.

Obviously there is the right time to add a product, and there is the wrong time to add a product. I’ve seen people do it both ways. You definitely need to make sure that you are financially able to support and your focus is still able to be there on the products that you have. You have people, either you have employees or things turned over so that’s like, the focus is still on those products, you can add more, and the finance is there. You are not gonna lose … You are not gonna not be able to replenish your other products because you spent that money on a new product now, and now you are gonna run out an inventory or something like that.

You kind of know when the time is right for focus and money, that’s the key things I would say, then it’s like launching these products as fast as possible, like launching products.

Jason K.: Launching products is huge, and that’s one of the great things about the community with ASM too is that you can ask these questions. You can ask people look, I’m thinking of expanding, this is where I am in my business, what do you think? You get all that feedback, because this is hard to do alone. Angie, I know you can vouch for this as you said, you are in the beauty market. The beauty market is gonna be completely different than the house and home market. Customers will react to things, promotions, everything will be different. By working in a community we are all sharing what’s working and helping one another, and talking about helping, you’ve also, not only have you helped people because of being able to hire people, but you also help a lot of people through charity and everything that has been happening because of this business you’ve been able to build.

Maybe you can share a little bit of that, because something that I’m a huge believer in, and I love that you are as well too is, it’s making this world a better place. This can be a tough place, and it’s our job to be able to help others, and the joy you get from that. Maybe you can share a little bit of that.

Angie: For sure. There is definitely some different charities that I’m very passionate about, and I care the whole thing on child trafficking and stuff like that, and human rights. I like to be able to help as much as I can, and I will help volunteering my time as much as I can, but if I’m able to help fund the different campaigns that are gonna actually stop child trafficking or something like that. I feel very honored to be able to support that sort of thing. I know about 50% of my income last year went to charities that I care about and that I’m passionate about and it helped a lot, because of that I get to … I’ve been awarded with just presented with different awards and things like that for my contribution which I’m really proud of. It’s something that I really enjoy being able to do for sure. I’ve been able to do on any level like this prior. The fact that I can be that now is really good.

Jason K.: I’m very proud of you. That’s very cool. I love people that give back.

Angie: Thank you.

Jason K.: Hang on. I just wanted to … Did you reinvest all your profit back into the other products or did you continue to invest it into your first product? How soon did you launch your … This is a good question too, because a lot of people hope they can sign right away and start earning a living right away. Maybe you can explain a little bit the process you followed and when you were able to actually starting money, and obviously this is your story, not what everyone has to do.

Angie: I think it also depends on what your purpose is for starting this business. I personally like to build a big business. My purpose was to do millions every year, and do it as fast as possible. For me in order to do that I needed to put as much back as possible to grow my first product and add new products. That was my intention for the first six months. Because I was working two jobs, I needed to be able to quit my other job and do Amazon full-time. I had to at some point take out some money for me to survive. I took out, and I lived on a shoe string budget for as long as I could, so that I could keep putting the money back in and keep growing.

I grew and I have 40 products now, and to be honest I didn’t add as many products as I had planned to last year. I wanted to have 100 products right now. I’m like dammit. That’s me. For most people it’s like, they could put money back in and probably start taking some back out. I would say there is probably a few months of getting your product going and rolling and making enough where you are gonna take some out but you want to be able to leave some in for growth. I’d say after a few months you should be able to do that.

Jason K.: The thing is though I think you’ve got to be clear with yourself what you want this to be too. I think that you hit on something that is a struggle for people too, they are hearing your story like half a million dollars a month and growing, you plan to do five times that. Remember, first of all, you are not Angie, and Angie is not you. She’s on her own path, this is the path she’s following. As you’ve heard her say, she’s on this agenda to grow this big business.

What does that mean? That means she’s sacrificing certain things to be able to do that. That means she doesn’t get to watch those TV shows that other people might want to watch. That’s her path. What’s that?

Angie: Never, I never watch TV ever.

Jason K.: Come on, Days of Our Lives maybe in the afternoon. I’m just kidding. Is that even on anymore? I don’t even know.

Angie: I don’t think so.

Jason K.: Where was I going with this? I’m so sorry.

Angie: Sorry.

Jason K.: It’s just about, you have to make choices. The cool thing though is if your choice is that I just want to get this started. I might only want to earn like a couple of thousand dollars a month extra. My goal might not be to do this, my goal might be just that I want to be able to help contribute or I want to be able to afford something more. I want to get a nice car. We have people that are doing that. Really it’s your input, something, because I see a lot of questions and I might have caused a little bit of confusion here when I said … Because when I was talking to the person about never leaving home. There is a list of countries and if you go to amazingsellingmachine.com and I believe it’s in video two, but it might be video one where we give you the list of countries that it’s hard to sell on from Amazon.

I believe Nigeria for example is one of them. There are some other countries like that where Amazon just doesn’t allow people that live there to even sell on the platform. For every other country out there we make it work. We’ll teach you exactly how to do it. It’s not really that hard, in fact, we recommend because there is a question here, I’m in the UK, do you recommend selling on Amazon.com? Absolutely, but what’s different is, a couple of years ago I would have said 100%, don’t do anything else, just go to Amazon.com, but things are changing now. Amazon is growing by leaps and bounds.

Now Amazon Germany, Amazon UK, Amazon Spain. These are all huge markets that if you are already over in Europe it’s just easier. You might as well get started right on Amazon.uk. What’s your opinion on that Angie?

Angie: I’d say 40% of my sales are actually from Europe, which is a high percentage I think relatively speaking. I went over there and I love the diversity, and it is like they are marketplaces that I would say are upcoming. They are not fully as saturated as dot.com, but I still love expanding on Amazon.com, but I like having the diversity in Europe. I’ve had prime day for example, where I’ll get prime day deals in the US, and I’ll get prime day deals in several countries in Europe. I think I did over like $150,000 just on prime day this last year, which was kind of just mild really, but it was nice having that kind of a day, but a big chunk of that also came from Europe.

Jason K.: There is no denying that Amazon.com, if you are the top selling product on Amazon.com, you are destroying what the results of the top product on Amazon Europe is. That also means you have that much more competition, and it is getting a little bit more aggressive, but it’s definitely in my opinion Amazon.com, you want to be on Amazon.com, because there is just so much traffic. For complications and strategies it’s just easier if you are in a country. Then now I’m opening up another can of worms, people are saying, so if I’m in Canada should I start on Amazon.ca? I’m gonna say no, because there is just not the amount of searches, not enough traffic. You won’t go anywhere.

Unless you are in the three countries I would … Japan is very good now too, but really for our northern hemisphere or wherever we are located, I would say Amazon.com, Europe would be the two main ones. If you are not located near any of those I would focus on Amazon.com primarily.

Angie: Yeah.

Jason K.: Do you use FBA or do use FBM?

Angie: FBA.

Jason K.: Bob’s is asking, I kind of summarized his question, he’s asking do you do your own fulfillment or do you allow Amazon? That’s one of the great things about Amazon is they’ll do the fulfillment for you and it’s just flawless in my opinion. Let me see here, when you launch a new product do you use ASM’s strategies like LBNR and promotion codes?

Angie: Yeah. I sure do.

Jason K.: Thanks George for doubting that as something people would use, but yes in fact it is. Who else do we have here? I think we have kind of hit all the questions. We’ve got a lot of people thanking you so much. That’s something that’s really awesome to hear too. If you could just leave a comment right now thanking Angie. She’s doing this on her own, free will. She’s just thankful that what this training has provided her, she wants to give back. It really is solid training, I really encourage you to check out amazingsellingmachine.com. We also have something that’s closing tonight, at midnight is that we have a special six month buyback guarantee that is only a limited time.

We are actually closing the doors for the six months buyback guarantee tonight. Essentially what that means is if you sign up and follow our system, we are giving you a whole six months to prove out the system, and if it doesn’t work for you following everything, we buyback, we guarantee your buyback. It takes all the risk from you, check it out, go to amazingsellingmachine.com, enter your name and email address. Go to the training, click on the build link, sign up and take advantage of that. I promise you it makes it … Not only do you have the initial 30 days to just go and just see if this training is what we say, see if the mentors are what we see. See if everything is what we say.

If by the next 30 days you are not interested, refund, cancel, don’t worry about it whatsoever, but if you are interested and you like Angie, and you really want to take control and you know you want this lifestyle, we want to be there and walk through this system with you and that’s why we’ve got this extended six months guarantee. It expires tonight, so you’ve got to sign up today. Angie, I don’t want to take up all your evening. Thank you so very much for doing this. Are there any closing remarks you’d love to share? You have so much wisdom, let’s hear some more from you.

Angie: Let’s see. I will say for anyone who is just getting started or actually this might even apply to people that have been out there for a while and maybe haven’t really gotten rolling. How important it is to just kind of … I’ll just say the speed. The speed, the speed at which you do things and get your products, and get out there is kind of important. Pick your product fast, don’t get too crazy about picking something that, don’t take a year to pick your product. Don’t try to customize, don’t try to … Make sure you have the best thing out there and it’s different from everybody else’s, so you have to do all the specialized manufacturing.

Really, try to start simple, pick something, go through the process, you’ll list out a bunch of opportunities for products. Pick something fast, just go with it, if it’s not something that kills it and is doing all the sales you wanted to do, it’s fine, because it will sell and then you’ll just get your next product. I see people sometimes they just don’t go fast enough on that, or they just get too complicated about picking their products and things.

That’s something that I will say in helping others and mentoring and things like that, that I find people doing that sometimes. For me even though I picked the wrong product at first, and it was a couple of months where I could say I wasted two months, I didn’t waste two months, and I still have that product, and it actually still makes me profit. It’s still out there. It’s a diehard, it’s awesome, it doesn’t do 100 sales a day but it does enough where I make enough profit, where I keep it around.

I went through all the steps, I did my listing, I learned how to ship to Amazon. I got the whole system in place, and I found who was gonna do my photography? I worked through all I needed to work through so that when I was ready for the second product I could have it out in a week or two. It was done, it was so easy, because I just had to duplicate everything that I already did. It made getting the next of my products out a lot faster, I already worked through everything. I just can’t stress how important it is just to kind of move and just pick something and get out there with it.

Jason K.: Take action. 100%, and that’s what the training is all based on is taking action. I see you Roxanne, pull the trigger. Lots of people saying, like Kristina saying, thank you, Jody, thank you, Francine, thank you. There is lots of, Tammy Hill thank you, looking forward to meet you in Orlando. Tammy Hill that’s cool. You were talking to me when you were saying hello at Orlando, right? I’m just kidding. We all know everyone just wants to meet Angie. I just like meeting Angie, so I get it. This was a cool little question I’m just gonna add. Angie, did you know what product you wanted to sell, or did the training teach you how to find a product to sell?

Angie: The training taught me, even though I had some ideas I didn’t know. The training taught me and I went out there and I looked, and it wasn’t a product I would have thought, but the products I found were based on the training, and based on looking through and looking the criteria and those are the ones I picked and I crashed it.

Jason K.: Very cool. Awesome. Thank you Angie so much for being here. Thank you for giving back so much as you do. Thank you for getting so involved at SellerCon and all of those things, and always being willing to come on live calls like this. Thanks for being a success student too. It’s one of the reasons that keeps us going when we see faces like yours that are just beaming because of what you’ve been able to create for yourself. It’s an honor knowing you, it’s been an honor to get to know you.

I know everyone that’s listening right now is better for it. Thank you. I hope you have a wonderful day, and on behalf amazing.com, the Amazing Selling Machine, and everyone on this call goodbye everyone have a great weekend and Angie thank you again.